The dispute in the East China Sea between China and Japan is escalating as we speak. The Japanese government has signed the purchase contract to buy some of the disputed islands from the wealthy Japanese Kurihara family, in defiance of Chinese demands.

China has reacted by sending two patrol vessels to a location near the islands. This could provoke a counter move from Japan, which is known to keep coast guard vessels on patrol near to the islands for landings by Chinese activists and fishermen. The situation is not good for relations between Japan and China.

Adding to the uncertainty of the problem is the unknown whereabouts of Xi Jinping, the Chinese heir apparent to Hu Jintao. Xi is set to take control of the Communist Party later this year, but he has suddenly cancelled several public meetings with foreign dignitaries, including the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Keep your eye on this story.

For a while now, China has claimed sovereignty over the whole South China Sea, up to the edges of its maritime neighbors’ islands, including Vietnam and the Philippines, using the vaguely defined clause in the UN Laws of the Sea that allows nations to claim an extension into ocean of their continental shelf as sovereign waters. With potentially vast fossil fuel resources under the ocean bed in both the South and East China Seas, China has claimed that its territorial waters extend out to the Okinawa trough in the E China Sea and up to the Philippine Islands in the S China Sea. That’s a whole hell of a lot more than the usual 12 mile limit of territorial waters that every nation is allowed. And it greatly restricts the 200 mile Economic Exclusion Zones that nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines should hold.

In the S China Sea, China has been disputing ownership of certain islands, islets and rocks such as the Spratly Islands with Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia among others. In the E China Sea, China and Taiwan have been arguing over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands with Japan. The news story above focuses on the Paracel Islands, roughly equidistant to Vietnam and China’s southern Hainan Island. The Paracels are mostly a grouping of 30 or so islets and reefs, with only a few that could reasonably be called true islands. Habitation on the islands is not self-sustainable and must be supported from the mainland.

The Paracels served historically as a place for resting station for fishermen from both Vietnam and China. Historically, ownership has passed between China, Vietnam, France and Japan, but they are currently held by China, a fact which Vietnam continues to protest. The current brouhaha concerns the establishment by China of Sansha City on the Paracels, which incorporates a formal city-level status for the Paracels in China’s bureaucracy. The city will also purportedly govern the Spratlys, which has appropriately scared the Philippines.

China has established a post office on the island with its own zip code, there already is an air strip there, since everything needed for habitation needs to be brought in, and China’s People’s Liberation Army recently announced the establishment of a garrison on the island for its defense, which will probably account for most of the population.

"Free Hans Island from the Canadian Oppression", proclaims one laughable website from Denmark. A headline from the Canadian Free Press meanwhile blares, "Hands Off Hans Island". The glittering prize in this Canadian-Danish standoff is the isolated, barren rock pictured to your left. What's the lesson to be gained here? Well, there are many, but we might want to start with properly drawing international maritime borders.

Hans Island lies in the long straight between the northwestern coast of Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island. Greenland is still an autonomous overseas territory of Denmark, waiting for the final stage of decolonization to come to its icy shores.

The reason why this dispute exists is this: Some wiseguy apparently drew the international border between Canada and Greenland right through Hans Island. Maybe there was a lot of ice when they drew the lines. It reminds me of that old Happy Days ep where Potsie and Ralph Malph drew a line down the middle of their apartment.

The Hans Island dispute is another one of the many maritime disputes occurring around the world, including the Senkaku/Diaoyu Island dispute between China and Japan, the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute between Japan and South Korea, the Paracel Islands dispute between Vietnam and China, the Spratly Islands dispute between China and most of its SE Asian neighbors, and of course the Falklands Islands row between the UK and Argentina.

Most of these disputes share two characteristics: natural resources and an abundance of nationalism. The natural resources are not just the fish in the ocean. In many of the above cases, resources also include potentially rich oil and natural gas reserves underneath the ocean bed. Claim the island, and you get the resources. The nationalism is cued by politicians trying to rile up their citizens to support the claims (and to gain support for themselves). The right-wing Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara made news recently with his idea that the Tokyo Metropolitan government "buy" and govern the Senkaku Islands. Argentina's need for resources and cash has reignited the Falklands dispute 20 years after the war.

The United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) created Economic Exclusion Zones off the shores of sovereign states. EEZs are 200 nautical mile swaths of water in which only the adjacent sovereign state has the authority over economic activity - fishing, oil and gas drilling, for example. So, if a state can claim an island out in the middle of the ocean, then that state will also own the circle of ocean with a 200 mile radius around the island.

Filipinos raising the flag at Scarborough Shoal

Of course, EEZs are technically not supposed to apply to uninhiabitable islets (rocks, sandbanks, and reefs) that cannot independently sustain human life, but that little drawback hasn't stopped the disputants from claiming such rocks and EEZs around them.

These disputes are counted among the world's most likely interstate conflicts. As one legal scholar argues, this means that international law in this case is not resolving conflict, which we think it should typically do, but rather making it more likely. Of course, these conflicts would exist in the absence of international law. What we really need are better written international laws, with less ambiguity, smaller EEZs where appropriate (such as in the South China Sea), and mechanisms that mandate multilateral agreements and international arbitration.